


In The Frosty Air

by chewysugar



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Christmas, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Redemption, Schizophrenia, Telepathy, Winter, emma frost centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-21 22:39:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16585610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chewysugar/pseuds/chewysugar
Summary: Never let it be said that Emma isn't a giving person.





	In The Frosty Air

Six thousand dollars worth of chinchilla kept the cold off of Emma Frost’s pristine body. But it did little to quell any ice that had long-since coated her heart.

Sashaying with all the poise of a Victoria Secret model down the snow-lined streets of Fifth Avenue, she looked like a million bucks. But even to those who didn’t know her, there was something in her composure that kept the world at bay.

Emma often thought, especially at this time of the rolling year, of one Ebenezer Scrooge. Granted, it was the only time she could stomach comparing herself to a stingy septuagenarian of literary fame; but the analogy proved all too accurate. Only, old Scrooge kept the world at a distance while looking like an icicle—jagged and sharp and unpleasant—and Emma Frost resembled a glacial lake.

Much as Scrooge’s frozen rime was all a humbug, Emma didn’t always think of her distance as a strength. She wanted to connect with her fellows—she just wanted it on her terms. And why should that be a bad thing? In her more maudlin moments, Emma considered herself something of a five-for-five minority: a woman; a wealthy woman; a mutant; a former villain, and the dreaded Other Woman. Society sneered at her. She’d have considered such a notion paranoia if it weren’t for the fact that she could hear, plain as day, what the rabble and others thought of her. Why shouldn’t she construct a wall or two?

Her boots clicked over freshly shoveled and salted asphalt. The brownstones, boutiques and gentrified eateries all around were coated in a glisten of ice and snow from the weekend’s latest inundation. Holiday lights winked from every window; wreaths were festooned on the street lamps. It was a veritable Connecticut Christmas transplanted to the Upper East Side.

Emma sighed. A flicker of emotion stirred beneath the rime. All the finery and festivity primed her for a haunting from her own Ghost of Christmas Past. In the Frost household, the holidays had been an occasion for a detente in the silent War of the Roses; something a little like love had been allowed to flourish, even among the glamor and grandiosity. Her father had shown off their wealth; but only because he believed Christmas was a time to indulge. Her mother has found odd moments of domesticity in baking succulent cookies and pastries that not even the chefs at the Chateau Marmont could duplicate. Her sisters had lain down their axes; and her brother—dear, Christian—had been treated like a human being.

It was all a sham. In the immediate aftermath, the Frost’s would return to perfect ice, and the battle would start anew and auld lang syne.

Though Emma had found reason to enjoy the Yuletide in recent years, it still failed to live up to the expectations set by the likes of Berlin, Crosby, Carey and Bublé.

Emma crossed the street, feeling her throat tighten. She gave her best icy glare to the street corner Salvation Army Santa. That organization was the last she’d donate to—not because their secret bigotry made her see holiday red, but also because it would have been as good as putting money back in her own pocket. Frost Enterprises had absorbed the Salvation Army years ago.

The momentary irritation coupled with the crippling memories proved a toxic combination, however. Her masterful control on her telepathy faltered for the briefest of seconds. A firestorm of sound blitzed through her mind: people’s fears, hopes, mundane thoughts broadcasted loud and clear with all the fervor of a hornet's nest.

Grimacing, Emma easily shut the millions of invisible doors in her consciousness. One last frantic flurry of thoughts flitted under the frame, and it was pitiful and beseeching enough to give her pause.

It wasn’t like the usual stream of thought that Emma was used to. The tumult chimed, horribly disjointed. She could scarcely make out anything distinct, but the emotion hit her like a bright searchlight: palpable, all-consuming terror.

Emma scanned the small square park she’d walked into. She could think of numerous places more far more apt to bring on such a state of fear in another being: the trees, though bare, were covered in snow and hoarfrost; one could see the neat buildings of New York City’s most luxe area from any place they looked in the little square. Nobody in the immediate vicinity looked or felt threatening.

But as Emma honed in on the jumble with no uncertain intrigue, she immediately understood the plight of the thinker. Her heart, now somewhat thawed thanks to the warmer memories of Christmases long long ago, sank. She’d spent enough time visiting Christian at his room at Austen Riggs, inadvertently drinking in the audible and psychical demons of the severely mentally unwell, to understand that the forlorn soul was suffering from something serious.

Emma walked primly down the frozen brick path. She expected, thanks in some small part to her own built up biases, to find a wretch prostrate and rambling to thin air; perhaps tearing at their ragged clothes and gaping at the sky.

Instead, the person whose thoughts were now ringing through Emma’s mind at supersonic pitch, appeared as well put together as the rest of the Upper East Side’s elite. The woman sat at one of the benches, clutching the arm like a life buoy. Graying hair tumbled from a stylish beret perched on the top of her head. Her tweed long coat, while not nearly as luxurious as Emma’s furs, still suggested wealth.

Emma sighed. As she stepped towards the bench, she took stock of the last several months. Deciding that most of the deeds that could have qualified as good had only been towards mutantkind, she allowed herself this. It wouldn’t kill her to tally off one good deed for the decade.

Keeping her gaze fixed on a frozen stone fountain in the middle of the square, she probed gently through the woman’s mind. The culprit behind her trauma soon made itself known.

Emma narrowed her eyes.

“You forgot to refill your prescription, Millicent.”

The woman started, and looked at Emma with wide eyes. Emma did not bother meeting her gaze, not when telepathy said so much.

“Are you an angel?” The woman asked, her voice trembling.

“Oh, I’m better than an angel.” Emma sighed. “It was too much money, wasn’t it, dear? You thought with the holidays approaching that you could be frugal and not spend the beastly amount of money it costs to keep you stable.”

Millicent took a deep breath, and sniffled. “I can’t remember,” she said thickly. Then her words spilled forth in a jumbled cluster, her voice stilted as she searched for coherency amidst the chaos. “Remember remember the fifth of December; December brings such wonderful plentiful—full, pull.”

Emma’s lips thinned. This woman, like so many afflicted with her illness, was about as threatening as a field mouse. Yet the very proximity to such naked pain twisted Emma’s heart in mingled sympathy and disgust.

She’d already determined that this would be her version of a holiday gift. As she spoke, she continued shifting through the fabric of Millicent’s shattered psyche; she wove through memories and fears; imaginings and hopes, taking care not to disrupt anything more than it had.

“People overthink sanity," Emma went on. "Doctors, peons on the street—screenwriters of rubbish television. They all wade under the delusion that the mind is something like a painting: that one’s life and perspective and values and trauma are splattered and stroked in some semblance of a Picasso. But that’s not it at all. The mind isn’t a painting...it’s a textile.”

Emma gently brushed a manicured finger against the thick knits of Millicent’s green scarf. Still lost in her burgeoning unwellness, Millicent didn’t pay Emma the slightest mind.

“Such gorgeous work,” Emma sighed. “Soft, but knitted with expertise and care. And the green...it looks ever so becoming on you, Millicent. _J’adore_ homemade presents. And you do too, don’t you? A precious gift from your darling sister.”

Within the tapestry of Millicent’s mind, Emma saw where the threads had unraveled. Not only had they unraveled, they’d also split in places, been tied in knots in others. But compared to the wars within the scope of consciousness that Emma had thought, this barely even qualified as child’s play.

“So easy,” Emma whispered. “Easier than people presume; a simple matter of a dropped stitch. One only has to find where the yarn came loose, pick it up with a hook, come back ‘round and, hey presto...sanity.”

Millicent gasped. Her eyes, once glazed and brimming with tears and confusion, snapped to attention. Her lips parted as, for the first time since the age of nineteen, pure and total mental cohesion became hers to embrace. She stared at Emma, seeing her for the first time.

Emma sat back against the bench, arms folded. “Slow snow fall,” she said, as if reading a stage direction. “ _Silent Night_ plays; The End.”

“What—

“An angel, dear.”

Millicent swallowed. Then she laid a hand over Emma’s, squeezing it with a maternal warmth that touched that part of Emma’s soul that still felt and acted human.

“Thank you,” Millicent said. “Oh, thank you.”

Rather than allow herself to be vulnerable, Emma projected orders into the woman’s mind: _go home, see your family, and never fear: you no longer need your pills_.

Millicent got to her feet and raced down the path—Bob Cratchit running to Camden Town to see Tiny Tim.

“God bless us, everyone,” Emma murmured to the woman’s retreating back.


End file.
